Friday, May 21, 2010

This is the clearest picture we could have of our failed national energy policy -- which extends over many decades and administrations.

It's not just the one BP oil rig. For example, since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20th, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico. Then there are the 12 new oil and gas drilling rigs launched in the U.S. this week.

And a whistleblower who survived the Gulf oil explosion claims in a lawsuit that BP's operations at another oil platform risk another catastrophic accident that could "dwarf" the Gulf oil spill, partly because BP never even reviewed critical engineering designs for the operation. And see this.

And the Department of Defense also apparently has some issues with extensive off-shore drilling for security reasons.

Many still believe that alternative energy is an expensive, unrealistic pipe dream.

But that is no longer necessarily true, especially when the externalities of environmental and military costs are taken into account.

Technological Breakthroughs

As I have previously pointed out:

One of the world's leading experts on trend forecasting says that producing our own energy for our homes and cars (called "micro generation") will become a huge trend in the next couple of decades.

What's he talking about?

Well, energy and food prices will keep going up. Every dollar we don't have to pay to the energy utility or food producers is a dollar we get to keep. And the technology for producing it ourselves is getting better and better.

So increasingly over the next couple of decades, we will generate our own energy and food.

***

Due to high oil prices, major breakthroughs in energy production are happening every day.

And as I've written before, alcohol has more alternative energy applications than you might know:

There's a secret history regarding alcohol that you won't hear on the six o'clock news:

Cars and everything else running on internal combustion engines can run on alcohol at least as well as they can run on gasoline. Indeed, engines were built back in 1870 that could run using either alcohol or gasoline

A New York Times article from 1908 (and here) enthusiastically states:

"Autoists Discuss Alcohol As Fuel; Great Future Ahead For Use In Commercial Wagons, Says Prof. Lucke. Tests With Motor Truck E.R. Hewitt Tells Engineers Of His Results With Gasoline And Alcohol In Same Engine"

Henry Ford said that alcohol was "a cleaner, nicer, better fuel for automobiles than gasoline" (James Brough, The Ford Dynasty: An American Story, p. 118, and cited in "Ford - The Men and the Machine", p. 365). The Model T Ford had a knob right on the dashboard to adjust the fuel-air mixture for either alcohol or gas

Alcohol does not corrode or shorten the lifespan of modern cars, and an inexpensive adjustment to regular cars will make them run smoothly and inexpensively on alcohol

And many government and car fleets are actually required to be able to run on either alcohol or gas. The car companies simply forgot to tell the American consumer that these kind of cars are available. See this and this.

The leading proponents of alcohol as fuel are not talking about corn. Corn is a lousy crop for making alcohol, and there are many other crops that are much more efficient. Indeed, the leaders in this field promote growing a wide variety of crops (appropriate for whatever specific climate you live in) , and many of the crops they suggest are also valuable food crops.

And you don't even need to use plants . . . you can make alcohol fuel out ofrotten fruit, stale soft drinks or donuts.

Heat can be used to generate electricity. This is true not only on the industrial scale, but even on the level of your home faucet. Indeed, inventors have already built home faucet kits which turn the unused heat from your hot water into electricity.

In hot climates, black thermal-electric mats could be installed on roofs to generate electricity.

Heat is a byproduct of other processes, and so nothing special needs to be done to create it. Just about every human activity and many natural processes create heat, so we just have to utilize it.

***

Another use of a free, wasted byproduct to generate electricity is piezo-electric energy. "Piezo" means pressure. Anything that produces pressure can produce energy.

For example, a train station in Japan installed piezo-electric equipment in the ground, so that the foot traffic of those walking through the train station generates electricity (turnstiles at train, subway and ferry stations, ballparks and amusement parks can also generate electricity).

Similarly, all exercise machines at the gym or at home can be hooked up to produce electricity.

But perhaps the greatest untapped sources of piezo-electric energy are freeways and busy roads. If piezo-electric mats were installed under the busiest sections, the thousands of tons of vehicles passing over each day would generate massive amounts of electricity for the city's use.

One day, virtually every surface will be turned into an energy-production medium. Instead of having discreet energy-producing machines, roofs, exterior walls, sidewalks, roads and many other surfaces will be coated with "smart materials" which convert light, heat, pressure and other inputs into useful energy, which are then collected, stored and distributed as needed.

Hundreds or thousands of years in the future, mankind might even learn how to collect the virtual particles which are constantly popping into and out of existence.

Harvesting The Ocean of Energy

Perhaps the biggest evolution needed in people's thinking - in any area of life - is how we think about energy.

The current paradigm is that energy is produced expensively by governments or large corporations through gigantic projects using enormous amounts of money, materials and manpower. Because energy can only be produced by the big boys, we the people must bow our heads to the powers-that-be. We must pay a lot of our hard-earned money to buy electricity from them, and we can't question the methods or results of their energy production.

Our life will become much better when we begin to understand that energy is all around us - as an ocean of electromagnetic forces and as a byproduct of other processes in the form of heat, pressure, etc. - and all we need do is learn how to harvest it.

The Gulf oil spill disaster must not be in vain.

We must use it to finally find the vision and the will to make the switch to alternative energy.

Moreover, approximately 6.5% of all power transmitted in the U.S. is lost through transmission line losses and other inefficiencies every year. By improving the efficiency of transmission lines, energy conservation can be greatly improved.

9 comments:

Brilliant. I'm seeing the concept of resilient communities flourishing among some really diverse groups of people- from survivalists to environmentalists to military to suburbanites.

Microgeneration is one of the major elements of decentralizing the system and achieving resilience. Right now, wind and solar is near grid parity in several locations. If you factor in solar fabrication following Moore's Law in terms of cost/kW and volatility in fossil fuel prices, we're reaching a tipping point that will result in a sea change.

It's unfortunate that all the economic stimulation is flowing nicely to the financial oligarchy. Doing something intelligent with that stimulus could go a long way towards improving national security, environmental security, creating jobs, and creating a sustainable economy. But that would be too "socialist."

There is no energy crisis. There is only a crisis of energy consumption that accompanies the crisis of our culture, e.g., what is being done with all the energy being consumed on the planet? Nothing very positive for humanity.

And even this crisis has succumbed to the ongoing collapse.

The colossally starry-eyed empirical futurists that think alternative energy is an admirable development -are delusional- exactly like those before them who thought nuclear energy the salvation of our humanity. Ha!

It would be better to forcefully discourage these scientists from meddling any further with the world until we can better assess the damage they have already wrought.

That damage has every appearance of being terminal to our species.

Turn your head away from that infernal computer monitor for a while -and look outside. --Now-- -imagine what that same vantage point from which you are looking -looked like- fifty, one-hundred and two hundred years ago.

Im here in Brasil working on Sustainable development programs and we have awesome technologies ready to go, including waste into construction materials, Organic water proof Polyurethene from plant oils, a forestry system that will not only produce huge amounts of food and materials but also be a genuine long term reforesting ... heres one example of our well researched and market ready technologies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAcW1VU5HNA

anyone who can help us get all this off the ground, we are well positioned and at a very critical stage, please write to me www.soulore.solaris@gmail.com

The use of renewable energy has long been encouraged and called for since time immemorial but some people just take the idea for granted. Now, more than ever, is the time to switch to renewable energy in order to curb global warming.

There are several electric companies here in Texas who uses natural gas as a source of energy. Texas electricity now develops natural gas, wind and stream as alternative and renewable sources of energy in the production of power supply . It's the reason why Texas electricity suppliers become cheaper and more environmental today.

The course in the fight against climate change is a protracted process, and we should start working now so we can save our earth before it gets really too late.

Solar power is very important and provides a natural way to heat, obtain electricity and water with just a little more effort. In the future we may have no other choice but to look at natural resources in order to have these necessities and conveniences. Solar power is important now and in the future.

indeed now is the time for us to act. Its time for us to shift to alternative energy sources that will not only protect our environment will have unlimited supply to last even beyond the future. Alternative energy sources like thae sun, wind and tide are only some of the best choices we got but if governments all over the world more especiqally the UN will fund more scientific researches about otyher alternative energy sources i think there are plenty out there waiting to be discovered.

We need to conserve energy if we want our children to enjoy what we have right now. However, alternative energy resource like renewable sources like solar and wind energy gives us the advantage of having an abundant energy source for the future.

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